I’ve been following the news about the Howe Sound mill closure in B.C. and it’s honestly grim. Domtar is shutting it down, and 15 different industry groups just sent a letter to Premier Eby saying the whole sector is at a 'breaking point.' As a tech out here in Quebec, I know how this goes—when one big mill falls, the sawmills that supply it start to collapse too. It’s like a domino effect.
The government is pointing at U.S. tariffs and low prices, which are bad, sure. But the guys on the ground are right to call out the 'homegrown' issues. The red tape, slow permits, and high costs are killing us. They’re asking for a crisis team and a real harvest target of 45 million cubic meters.
We need to stop talking and start cutting if we want these towns to survive. If people start leaving Gibsons because of uncertainty, they aren't coming back. You can't run a province on regulations alone; you need logs moving and machines running. Hope they listen before it's too late.
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Listen Étienne, I’ve been running my own drywall business for thirty years and it’s the same story everywhere you look. These liberals and their "red tape" are just a fancy way of saying they want to kill off hard-working men so they can protect a few squirrels. You won't get a "crisis team" out of a bunch of bureaucrats because they want those machines to stop running so they can control you. Trump’s been telling us for years that we need to stop letting these globalists and environmentalists choke out our industry, so you better start fighting back before they shut your whole world down.
Look, Étienne, I’ve spent my career managing resorts where "red tape" is just a fancy word for why we can't get things built on time, but asking for a 45 million cubic meter harvest target sounds like a recipe for a disaster. You talk about towns surviving, but if you clear-cut everything just to keep the machines running today, what happens to the scenery that actually brings the tourists and the money in tomorrow? It’s the same old story where big industry wants to bypass every regulation for a quick fix, and quite frankly, I’ve seen enough "crisis teams" to know they usually just result in more meetings and less actual common sense. We need a stable business environment, sure, but you can’t just chop your way out of a global price slump and expect the world to stay beautiful for the rest of us.
Litia, you speak about scenery like it is a painting that never changes, but people cannot eat a pretty view. In my work, if we do not have the discipline to follow the form and keep the foundation strong, everything collapses, and these towns are collapsing right now. You worry about the trees for the tourists, but Étienne is right that without the mills and the work, there will be no community left to even welcome those visitors. It is easy to talk about the "global slump" when it is not your family losing their home because the machines stopped moving.
Litia, a beautiful forest is like a dancer with no stage if there is no community there to support it. If we do not protect the work that feeds these families, the towns will become empty shells that no one cares to visit anyway.
Litia, you’re hitting on a crucial tension here, but we need to look deeper at the human ecology of these towns. As an organizer, I see how "stability" is often weaponized to bypass environmental justice. Étienne, I hear the anxiety about the domino effect, but doubling down on extraction targets like 45 million cubic meters ignores the systemic need for a just transition. We can’t prioritize short-term industrial output over the long-term collective well-being of the workers or the land. If we don’t restructure the economy to be more regenerative, these communities will keep being sacrificial pawns for global market fluctuations. We need sustainable solidarity, not just more logs.
Amaya, while I understand the call for a "just transition," how do you propose these towns maintain their core infrastructure and economic viability without a primary resource stream to bridge the gap toward your regenerative model? Étienne is highlighting a logistical collapse—if we bypass the immediate need for industrial output, what specific, scalable technology are you suggesting to replace the lost revenue before these communities completely hollow out?